Tag Archives: Twitter Revolution

This your special correspondant H, reporting to you from the Tea Party. It’s been a crazy year. We have a new president, a new style of revolution, and a Tea Party???

Have any of you heard of the term Digital Native? This term sparked my attention during my research. I have also tagged it onto our blog. So what does it mean?

Some Digital Natives are deeply affiliated with all sorts of interests that bring them together organically: Piracy groups, massively multiplayer online games, open source software development, cracking encryption, etc. Others become deeply interested in movements such as Anonymous, the RBN (Russian Business Network), or even terrorist organizations.

The three movements I have listed in my title all POSSESS people of this type. A Digital Native as an online footprint or citizenshipin the internet realm as well as the physical world.

I bring this up mainly because people tend to collaborate online more, and in much larger numbers because of the anonymity that is involved. People will voice their opinions and be free.

Currently the predominate view of the Tea Party is:

Within the Tea Party, there are separate factions with separate goals. Some activists want the various parties to coalesce into a single organization, while others want to keep it a grass-roots movement with no leader. via CNN

The idea of no leadership goes back to the “Hive Mind” or collective aspect of these group. Internet technology enables this structure to exist so no formal leadership is not required.

In this case of the Iranian so called “Green” Twitter Revolution, a repressed country such as Iran, uses only these sorts of outlets to get their messages across. Iranian’s used different tactics that the Tea Party because they had to keep their identities hidden. No formal leadership is established on the net for the Iranian activists. It is a cause that keeps them unified. The following are list of general tactics used during the June Elections in Tehran.

The Tea Party doesn’t have to be concerned with concealing their identities. They protest freely in the streets without worry of being photographed. What are some of the tactics they use? In the case of twitter, they are not on a centralized network because there are many Tea Parties depending upon the region you live in. Fundamentally, they can be categorized as a distributed network.

The Presidential campaign encompassed many different tools via the internet. The You Tube debate was very popular, by having ordinary citizens post their questions online via video for the candidates to answer.

Democratic Party candidate Barack Obama created a broad grassroots movement and a new method of campaigning by courting and mobilizing activists, donations, and voters through the Internet. It was part of a campaign that mobilized grassroots workers in every state. Obama also set fundraising records in more than one month by gaining support from a record-breaking number of individual small donors.

Another example of Internet use in political movements:

Ron Paul:

On December 16, 2007, Ron Paul collected $6 million, more money on a single day through Internet donations than any presidential candidate in US history.